Thanks, Trevor, yes it has become much more productive
They are on their way, Pauline
Not sure what the customs duty will be
Cheers, Wurzel
Thanks, Katrina, much appreciated
Thanks, essex, yes we are lucky to have the Maps breeding here
It's very satisfying, David, to have Swallowtails in our garden and to be able to watch their development. Yes we've had some rubbish weather of late, hopefully it won't impact on butterfly numbers
Thursday 24th June
Given that today would be the only decent day weatherwise for a while, we decided to make our first foray further afield and visit a nature reserve about an hours drive from us. This reserve appears on a French website,
https://www.reserves-naturelles.org/carte-des-reserves and is described as a south facing limestone hillside. This sounded from the description that it could be a good site for butterflies, and it also looked good from the satellite view on Google Maps, a large site of 25 hectares.
After a little bit of a glitch with our sat-nav (and were saved by Google Maps on a mobile) we finally arrived at the site around 11am. First impressions were very favourable as a Marbled White flew past as we got out of the car, our first MW of the year. Hurriedly grabbing our gear we passed through the gate onto the reserve proper. In front of us appeared a lovely grassland full of wild flowers, which stretched downhill for some distance before ending at the boundary fence and the adjoining arable field. As we made our way down the hillside to get out of the worst of the breeze, we began to encounter more butterflies. Marbled Whites (we only saw males) appeared to be on every flower head, especially scabious, but they weren’t easy to photograph as the tall stems were waving around in even the slightest breeze.
The exciting thing about butterflying, is that you never know exactly what you are going to find.
Today, totally unexpectedly, we found about a dozen Clouded Yellows flying along the bottom of the slope. I am now pretty sure that these are Bergers Clouded Yellow, as we’ve seen before further south in France. As we watched they would occasionally stop to nectar, usually on a scabious flower, so we set about getting some shots.
Another pleasant surprise was to find a few Pearly Heaths, mainly nectaring on thyme low down in the grass, so only a couple of reasonable shots, we also didn’t expect to see these here, they were among the many Small heaths we also saw on this site. Once again we had only ever seen these further south too.
The final surprise was the discovery of many Violet (Weavers) Fritillaries here. Although most were fairly worn, perhaps our next visit will reveal some second brood individuals.
Also seen were, Meadow Brown, Dark Green Fritillary, Common Blue and Adonis Blue males and females, all worn. So, in all not many species seen, but good numbers of each and we intend to pay another visit to this in a couple of weeks and take a closer look, as we didn’t get to explore the whole of the reserve.
And the site, we saw no signs of any visitation from anybody, no paths through the grass apart from those from the grazers, the signs of which we saw, a lovely site.
Cheers for the Map info form last time 
